Dosing Tricky Dick
While Paul and I swiftly became a unit, the right-wing Republican situation was offering us great pickings for subcultural entertainment. When Airplane performed at the Fillmore East in New York, I wore a Hitler outfit and Rip Torn joined us up onstage dressed as my buddy, Richard Nixon. We enjoyed the brief satire so much that Paul and I went to see Rip Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page, to discuss doing Richard III (the idea was that Rip would play Richard Nixon playing the Shakespearean king) in the round with rock band accompaniment. We dropped the idea when we learned more about the logistics involved. It would have taken the support of the Sultan of Brunei to get the production on the road. But dreaming up the idea was almost as much fun as the actual performance would have been.
Another grandiose “Get Nixon” idea we came up with was the “Let's Dose Dickie” trick. That one wasn't carried through to conclusion either, which was probably fortunate since the repercussions might have been more than we bargained for. But the planning stages were pretty exciting.
Tricky Dick Nixon, as he was fondly referred to by people not part of his inane circle, had a daughter, Tricia, who had attended Finch College about ten years after my stay at the “bow and curtsey” academy. Which led to Yours Truly, of all people, getting an invitation to tea at the White House.
One of the other Finchettes, Mrs. David Busby, who'd been a suite mate of mine, was in charge of passing judgment on each alumna's character—or lack thereof. It seems that she was warned by all the proper ladies who'd heard of the notorious Grace Slick not to send me an invitation because I'd become a “lefty,” one of the drug-crazed antigovernment hippies from the San Francisco rock tribes. But poor sweet Mrs. Busby stood up for the Grace she remembered. Going against the counsel of the other Finchettes, she sent me the invitation. When she asked me who my “escort” would be, I quickly said, “Mr. Leonard Haufman.”
Mrs. Busby recalls, “The man's name made an impression on me, but it never occurred to me that she was talking about Abbie Hoffman. I just wrote down his name and listed it with the others I was sending to the State Department for clearance.”
The next morning, Mrs. B. got an urgent call from the White House. “What's the problem?” she asked.
“The problem, Mrs. Busby,” the security guard told her, “is Grace Slick.”
I was pretty good friends with Abbie at the time. In fact, he, his wife, Anita, and Paul and I occasionally used to get together to discuss politics and pranks. One time, we all took a trip to Gettysburg, where we listened to tape-recorded information that came crackling out of boxes that looked like parking meters. Push a button and hear some glorious interpretation of the Civil War slaughter that made that particular cemetery such a popular tourist attraction.
Abbie, a political activist, was later wanted by the FBI, CIA, AT&T, BLT, and several other important government agencies, so he had to go “underground” for quite a while. At one point, he hid in Paul's and my house in San Francisco, where he engaged in subversive terrorist activities like entertaining the kids at China's birthday party. He loved the idea of this country (theory and practice often being diametrically opposed), but the manner in which the original documents of freedom had been mangled to steer corporate/military interests drove him close to clinically insane. I believe it was grief for a nation that finally killed him. If all of us had been that concerned, “political sins of omission” would no longer be a problem.
So when I was deciding on an escort for the White House, I invited Abbie because I couldn't think of anyone who'd be more delighted to visit the seat of Western power. The day of the tea, I tried to flatten Abbie's hair—he had a big afro and we didn't want to look like a couple of screaming hippies. But when I got through with him and he put on a suit and tie, he looked like a hit man for the Mafia. Really, he looked awful, more intimidating straight than when he wore his American flag shirt.
The Finch alumni lined up in front of the White House in their camel-hair coats, the obligatory round gold pin on the lapel with matching gold earrings, medium-heeled beige shoes, panty hose, and long, camel-hair skirts with beige silk blouses. I stood in line beside Abbie in my black fishnet top with three-by-three-inch patch pockets just covering my nipples, a short black miniskirt that went all the way to the beaver, and long black boots that reached up to my thighs. Looking like a pimp and a go-go girl, the two of us couldn't have been more thrilled to have been invited to Nixon's White House, because unlike the beige crowd surrounding us, we had a personal agenda.
In our pockets was more than enough powdered acid to get a lot of people very high, but we weren't interested in a lot of people. Richard Milhous Nixon was our mark. Having been trained in formal tea etiquette at Finch, I knew this would not be a sit-down affair. There'd probably be two very long tables set up with a large tea urn at one end, maybe a coffee urn beside it, and people would stand around, sipping and conversing with each other. The plan was for me to reach my overly long pinky fingernail, grown especially for easy cocaine snorting, into my pocket, fill it with six hundred mics of pure powdered LSD, and with a large entertainer's gesture, drop the acid into Tricky Dick's teacup. If I missed, Abbie was my backup. We knew we wouldn't have the pleasure of seeing Nixon tripping (LSD takes a while to kick in), but the idea that he might be stumbling through the White House a little later, talking to paintings, watching walls melt, and thinking he was turning into a bulldog, was irresistible.
Although it was raining outside the White House, staining multiple pairs of Gucci shoes, the security boys detained everyone, thoroughly checking their identification and giving them an appraising eye.
“Excuse me, miss, but may I see your invitation?” one of the guards said to me. “And your ID.”
He took my invitation with the name Grace Wing on it, and my driver's license, to the security booth and came back. “I'm sorry, Miss Wing,” he said. “You can't go in.”
“But I have an invitation,” I argued.
“Look. We know you're Grace Slick and we consider you a security risk. You're on the FBI list.” I hadn't done anything subversive that I knew of—it must have been some of my lyrics. And God only knows what they'd dug up on Abbie.
The guards finally agreed I could come in, but only by myself. Abbie would have to stay out. I told them I never went anywhere without my own security guard, and Abbie added, “I wouldn't let Miss Slick go in there alone, because I understand they lose a president every three years. It's a dangerous place.”
Abbie and I left, and Mrs. Busby went to the tea sans revolutionaries. But to everyone's surprise, the social secretary said, “Go back and find them. Mrs. Nixon and Tricia really want to meet her.” Unfortunately, we were long gone. I read that Tricia later commented, “If she had to come with a bodyguard, I feel sorry for her. She must be really paranoid.”
Not as paranoid as your daddy was when McCord, Liddy, and Dean copped out on his unsuccessful wiretapping trick.
Nixon never got the ride of his life, but Abbie and I had vivid images of reading in the newspaper that he'd suddenly taken ill and was spending a few days at Walter Reed, the army hospital where the CIA would have hidden him away until they figured out what made him crack. Of course, from what we later learned about Nixon, he walked around the White House talking to pictures anyway, so maybe nobody would have noticed much of a change.
I'll concede it now, the LSD thing was an irresponsible and dangerous plot. At the time, though, we were so fired up about Vietnam, so incensed that some pitiful malformation of mental functions was making the old men in power assume we should kill our young, able-bodied boys for no reason, we didn't care what it took to get the president's attention. We'd hoped that after he got through acting crazy, Tricky might contemplate his navel for six hours and decide that government just wasn't the way to go. What if he really saw the truth, shifted gears, and left politics? It was a good thought, but ultimately, we didn't have to dose him. He overdosed himself on love of power, driving himself out of office without any outside help.